Noelle m.

How can you be more “authentic”?

Let’s say you’re an artist and one day, you find yourself miserable and lonely, so you create paintings that depict your sadness and trauma. I’ve seen this often and I find that negative emotions fuel the creative person and bring out their desire for self-expression.

Those feelings were authentic. They are real to how one feels in the moment, but they aren’t truly what it means to be authentic.

Being authentic means coming from a place of love.

Emotions fluctuate day by day and it’s difficult to predict how you would feel tomorrow, weeks, or even years from now. A new insight, a new experience and/or a new person may enter your life, so how can authenticity withstand the test of time?

I hope to never stop growing as a person, but part of what tells me I am on the right path and am being my authentic self is if I am becoming more loving, forgiving, humble and kind.

The truest form of the soul is love… but what even is love?

Love is humility, patience and mercy.

Many if not all of us are kind and loving to people but only if they say and do lovable things to us. If people bruise our ego, our pride may make us lash out at them at a moments notice. I too am guilty of pushing people away who I think are unhealthy for me and also mirroring the negative energy of others.

It takes time, and because of this, authenticity is a journey and an evolution towards love.

The ‘love myself’ movement and the act of loving yourself at your current state thus defeats the purpose of authenticity because love is placing others before self and there is also always room for improvement.

This doesn’t mean putting extra effort into making others a priority or giving all your time and attention to people while they take advantage of you because this is unhealthy regardless of whether or not you are an extrovert.

But if you pay attention to how you feel when you are alone, find out if your thoughts, feelings and actions are coming from a place of love. And I ask you to consider the thought that regardless of the outcome of your life, successes and failures, that you have a soul that desires to resemble love.

I don’t know what your situation may be, or if I addressed what you were hoping to learn about being more “authentic”, though this is what authenticity means to me.